Wednesday, May 2, 2012

State holds off on killing Kenai Peninsula wolves

May 1, 2012

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Kenai Peninsula wolves will get at least a year reprieve from state-sanctioned culling.

State game officials say they will study the best way to boost
the moose population on the area south of Anchorage rather than
immediately act on a proposal approved by the state Board of Game in
January to expand predator control.

Doug Vincent Lang, acting
director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation, said Tuesday there
were gaps in the basic science foundation needed to proceed with
predator management, rebuild the moose population and evaluate whether
actions taken would be successful.

"I thought it was worthwhile to
spend some additional time to collect that foundational science to
inform how best to proceed in the future," he said.

John
Toppenberg, a board member of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, said from
Soldotna that he welcomed the decision and that he continues to disagree
with the Game Board vote to kill Kenai Peninsula wolves.

"What
they had proposed really had no scientific logic behind it," Toppenberg
said. "It was purely, 'Let's kill wolves in order to artificially
inflate moose.'"

The Board of Game, a seven-member panel appointed
by the governor that sets game seasons and bag limits, voted to extend
predator control to two game units on the peninsula, continuing an
aggressive approach to killing wolves, black bears and grizzly bears to
boost moose and caribou numbers through liberal predator hunting and
trapping seasons or professional culling, which usually means shooting
them from the air.

The board voted to kill wolves in Game Unit
15A, the area west of Cooper Landing and north of the Sterling Highway,
and 15C, which covers much of the peninsula south of Kasilof and west of
Kenai Fjords National Park.

The decision was made over the
protest of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and other groups that contend
the board is dominated by sport hunting advocates interested in boosting
ungulate populations for trophy hunters at the expense of other
wildlife.

In the case of peninsula moose, critics said, the board
ignored the main problem — loss of habitat due to 60 years of wildfire
suppression.

"It doesn't matter how many wolves you kill if they don't have anything to eat," Toppenberg said.
The
Kenai Peninsula includes thousands of acres of national wildlife refuge
and federal managers elsewhere have rejected predator control. The
state could have begun killing wolves immediately on state and private
land. Vincent-Lang said the department supports intensive management
proposal on the peninsula but wants to increase its body of knowledge
needed to inform its decisions.

Studies are under way. The
department this year fitted 50 adult cow moose in each unit with radio
collars, transmitters and vaginal implants as part of a study to
determine pregnancy and calving rates. The department wants to know if
there are sufficient bulls to breed all available cows or whether
nutrition is playing a role in keeping numbers down.

Biologists
are attempting to assess the cause of calf mortality and to determine
the significance of predation by wolves and bears. Newborn calves,
Vincent-Lang said, will be fitted with expandable radio collars, and if
they die during their first seven months or so, biologists will be able
to quickly locate carcasses to determine cause of death.

The department also will conduct baseline population work, he said, to determine the number of peninsula moose and wolves.

He
acknowledged that multiple factors, including habitat, predation and
mortality by humans, have effects on the moose population.

"I think it's important to look at all three of those elements," he said.

Toppenberg
said the studies will take at least two years. He expressed hope that
the department will not start killing wolves in 2013.

"I hope they
wait for the full results rather than partial results of that study
before making any kind of a decision to go ahead," he said.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone